Why North Koreans love Gone With the Wind

North Korea government publishes Margaret Mitchell's 1936 Civil War epic Gone
With the Wind

A copy of the American classic novel "Gone With The Wind" sits on a table inside the Grand People's Study House in Pyongyang, North KoreaPhoto: AP

12:08PM BST 25 Oct 2012

American culture has always been quietly popular in North Korea, where there are fans of everything from Mark Twain's short stories to bootleg Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.

But the latest hit is a story of a nation divided by war, its defeated cities reduced to smoulder and ruins, its humbled aristocrats reduced to starvation. The book is Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell's 1936 Civil War epic.

In a country thought to have the world's tightest censorship net, the government has published a novel that longs for the days of the slave-owning American South.

Maybe the explanation is in Mitchell's own words.

"They had known war and terror and hunger, had seen dear ones dead before their times," Mitchell writes of postwar southerners. "They had hungered and been ragged and lived with the wolf at the door. And they had rebuilt fortune from ruin."

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In "Gone With the Wind," North Koreans found echoes of their own history and insights into the United States: bloody civil wars fought nearly a century apart; two cities - Atlanta and Pyongyang - reduced to rubble after attacks by U.S. forces; two cultures that still celebrate the way they stood up to the Yankees. If North Koreans have yet to find fortune, they haven't given up.

"In North Korea only the strong survive," said the onetime black marketeer, a former salesman of used televisions who spent much of his life in Pyongyang but who eventually escaped to South Korea. "That's the most compelling message of the novel," he told Associated Press reporter Tim Sullivan.

Ambitious young North Korean women, raised amid deeply entrenched sexism, find inspiration in Scarlett's rise from ruin. Men revel in the muscularity of her swashbuckling love, Rhett Butler. People struggling with a lack of heat in winter, or political infighting, or the everyday pain of a marriage gone to hell can disappear into Mitchell's story

It also moved into official life. The movie, forbidden to the general public but beloved by the former dictator and movie buff, Kim Jong Il, is sometimes used in English-language programs to train elite government officials. North Korean negotiators meeting with U.S. envoys would occasionally quote from it, once replying to American criticism with the quote (which perfectionists might note is slightly off from the book and the movie): "Frankly, Scarlett, I don't give a damn."

Ask around in this capital city, an enclave of North Korea's educated elite, and nearly everyone has something to say about it.

"Scarlett is a strong woman," said Pak Su Mi, a twenty-something guide at Pyongyang's main library, The Grand People's Study House, a maze of house-sized rooms lit by stuttering fluorescent lights where the smell of mildew often hangs heavily.

Gone With the Wind is one of the best-selling novels in modern history and still sells about 50,000 copies worldwide every year, according to its publisher, Scribner.

Some believe the decision to publish Gone With the Wind was meant as a symbolic peace offering from North Korea to the United States - the two nations have sparred for years over Pyongyang's nuclear program. Others see it as an attempt by the government to teach its people about American culture, or at least Mitchell's version of that culture.